These Are the Damned
by SoloMoon
Summary: Tom does his best to encourage Jake to be irresponsible for once, and in the process learns more than he necessarily wanted to about where Jake's head is at right now. The boys struggle to talk and to find common ground as some of the darker truths of the war get laid out between them. Emotional h/c with a happy ending. Eleutherophobia pt. 5.


**A/N** : Written to the sounds of "Somewhat Damaged" by Nice Is Neat.

 **Content warning** : This fic contains some strong language, underage drinking, and discussion of tough subjects including suicidal ideation. For more extensive warnings, please message me.

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Jake took a huge swig of Fireball whiskey straight out of the bottle—and almost dropped it when he started coughing and sputtering.

I burst out laughing, grabbing the bottle away from him before he could spill any of it.

"That's disgusting," he said, hoarse from the alcohol burn.

I tossed my head back and took a long drink of my own, swallowing through the sharpness. "Keep trying and you'll acquire the taste," I said.

Never one to back down from a challenge, he grabbed the bottle back from me and took another, more conservative sip.

It was by far the easiest illegal alcohol purchase I'd ever made. The process was ridiculously simple: all I'd had to do was corner a guy who was clearly way over 21 coming out of the grocery store. Then I'd started shaking his hand and thanking him for his valuable service to this country, picking up his DNA in the process.

People did it to Jake all the time whenever we were out in public. Usually Jake would respond by standing there looking politely confused while I made some loudly whispered comment to the effect of "Dude, she thinks that you're Marco Alvarez. Take advantage!" This generally got the poor hapless civilian to stammer out something about how, actually, he looked a lot like Jake Berenson, but clearly that was their mistake. It was probably rude of us, but it also got people to leave him alone without demanding an autograph—or, infinitely worse, an explanation for Rachel's death.

I felt a little bit bad about pulling the same _thanks for serving the country, confused stranger_ routine on some random old guy, but he just gave me a dazed smile and a vague "You're welcome" (which made me wonder if he actually had fought in Vietnam after all) before wandering off.

Back when I used to buy alcohol with the basketball team, we'd had to lurk nervously two blocks down from the store while the one kid who had access to his older brother's license fronted the whole purchase. We'd all just had to pray we didn't get caught and thrown in jail. This time around I just morphed the guy, walked into the grocery store, and paid cash for a handle of whiskey without getting IDed. Isn't modern technology miraculous.

Now I closed my eyes, tilting my face toward the fading warmth of the sunset as I listened to Jake try to take another gulp without coughing too much.

I figured that corrupting my innocent baby brother with the ways of cheap alcohol consumed illegally was a necessary rite of passage.

Okay, admittedly, If I'd bothered to picture doing something like this back when I was his age I probably wouldn't have imagined that we'd end up flying almost fifty stories straight up, demorphing, and sitting on the roof of the EGS Tower to prevent any random passerby from getting a photo of an American icon drinking underage and then selling it to _Us Weekly_. But it still felt... normal. It was the kind of thing that idiot teenage boys the world over who'd never had a thing to do with the war were probably doing right now.

It felt fun, and comfortable, to be acting my age for once. And that wasn't just the alcohol talking.

"This is nice," Jake said softly. "And see?" He took a long sip, this time not sputtering. "I'm getting better, right?"

"I'm so proud," I drawled. "We'll make a hooligan out of you yet, midget."

"Oh good." Jake smiled. "Just when I was thinking of retiring from a career of blowing up buildings and attacking volunteer organizations to a life of boring obscurity. _You're_ going to show little old _me_ how to break laws."

"Okay, first of all, calling it a 'volunteer organization' suggests most of The Sharing's members were there, y'know, _voluntarily_ —"

"Yeah, but—"

"And second, breaking laws in the name of _the greater good_ does not qualify as hooliganism. As far as I'm concerned, you're still short one idiot teen rebellion phase, and that is a friggin' travesty."

"Well," Jake said, taking another pointed sip, "Thank goodness you came along to show me how it's done."

"Yeah." I snorted. "Plus, I so need to drink to forget about today."

Jake whacked me on the arm hard enough that it actually hurt. "Stop being such a baby—it wasn't that bad!"

"Oh, what would you know?" I asked, grabbing the bottle back from him. "It's all your fault. And now I'm traumatized. For life."

Jake threw up his hands. "What did you want me to do, lie to a bunch of first graders?"

"Yes!" And now I was blushing from more than just the alcohol. _Lie_ , he'd said. Implying he'd told the truth earlier. Goddamn idiot kid. "Some rule-breaker you are."

The public appearances he'd done in the past ranged from excruciating (we still tried not to talk about that first CBS panel) to ridiculous (Marco had shanghaied him into everything from breaking wine bottles on ships to christening tiger cubs at the LA zoo) to plain weird (one British tabloid had been painfully interested in the question of whether one could morph the size of one's penis without changing the rest of one's body).

I think I owed a huge favor to whichever publicist it was that had set up today's event, where Jake had been interviewed by the whole class of first graders who had won their county's academic achievement prize.

It had gone far better than anything Jake had done in the past, my whining aside. The kids all clearly thought that Jake was Spider-Man and Superman and Captain America all rolled into one, and rather than wasting time on trivialities like battle tactics or personal ideologies the way that CNN and FOX always did, they got down to the really important questions: What was the grossest thing he'd ever eaten while in morph? Was it true that he'd ACTUALLY gone to the REAL North Pole one time? Why were tigers orange, anyway? How come people could morph into aliens but not plants? Who would win a fight between a great white shark and a polar bear?

Jake had been relaxed in front of the camera for the first time I'd ever seen, listening closely to each question but also answering without hesitation. He made the whole class laugh talking about his attempts to teach Ax about human etiquette, and made the student teachers go misty-eyed when he told them about flying with Rachel.

He actually succeeded in holding the attention of nineteen six-year-olds for more or less the entire hour, although it probably helped that he'd let himself get talked into a live morphing demonstration in the middle. Wisely, he'd chosen the least-gross option of turning into another human. He solemnly asked their teacher for permission to acquire her DNA, stopping to explain to the whole class why it was important to ask first. And then he'd morphed her right there in the front of the room.

After he'd demorphed some little girl, completely forgetting to ask a question, had raised her hand and blurted out "I wanna be just like you when I grow up!"

Jake had crouched down far enough to look her in the eye, and said, "You can be anything you want when you grow up, if you just work at it hard enough."

"Who did you want to be when you grew up?" the teacher had asked, jumping in to save the interaction.

Jake had considered for a second before he said, "Kevin Johnson, if I had to pick someone famous. But really, I wanted to grow up to be just like my big brother."

Of course, _of course_ it was that last clip that the hourly news had picked up and run with. And _Kevin Johnson_ hadn't been the one with his phone ringing off the hook looking for a quote ever since. _Kevin Johnson_ probably wasn't still cringing at the thought nearly eight hours later.

I had been trying to come up with creative ways to murder him ever since. Jake, that is, not Kevin Johnson.

"I'm just going to die of embarrassment," I said now. "Farewell, cruel world. There go I. You have killed me."

"That didn't take much," Jake muttered, apparently unrepentant.

I crossed my arms. "You do realize that _every single person_ in the entire _world_ might at some point see that broadcast, right?"

Jake rolled his eyes. "If I'd known you were going to be such a drama queen about it, I would have kept my trap shut."

"Good! That'll show you!"

"Maybe I will lie next time." He lifted his chin defiantly.

"Anyway, I know you must have lied about at least some of that shit, because that was _way_ tamer than any account of the Battle of Santa Barbara than I've heard in the past. You could have totally lied about the 'who do you want to be' thing."

"I _was_ telling the truth about the Battle of Santa Barbara, I just left out... pretty much everything." Jake shrugged apologetically.

I laughed. "If you say so."

Jake grinned slyly. "I did, however, lie about the spider."

"In that case, do I even want to know what the _actual_ grossest thing you've ever eaten in morph is?" I asked with no small amount of trepidation.

"I think most of the others were most freaked out by drinking blood—we all did that at some point as fleas. Technically, that's eating humans, so a little weird."

I suppressed a shudder, trying not to think about the amount of time Rachel had spent sitting on me in flea morph before that last battle.

"But the squid thing was way worse, at least for me," Jake said. "We had all just morphed giant squids, and there was, like, no reliable information on them anywhere so we weren't sure what we were getting into..."

"Please tell me you didn't go all kracken on some innocent ship and now you're going to swear me to secrecy." I flopped backwards on the roof, lying flat on the concrete.

"Um, no. Turns out squids eat other squids. Which I didn't know was going to happen until I'd already grabbed Tobias, ripped one of his tentacles off, and then..."

I gagged. "Yeah, yeah, I get the picture."

"He was very nice about it, told me it was okay," Jake said softly. "But then that's Tobias for you. He can be too nice sometimes, not stick up for himself, y'know?"

I made a vague noise of agreement, even though I didn't, in fact, know.

"Even after... everything, he's so willing to give people a chance. Even _Taylor_." Jake's voice was still quieter now. "If there's a trick to that then I don't have it."

There didn't seem to be an answer to that, so I didn't offer one. Dusk was creeping across the sky, darkness swallowing the purple and orange of the clouds. It was a dull sort of blackness, too light-polluted for stars and lacking any trace of a moon. Times like these you could almost feel the planet moving under you as you watched the sun roll out of sight behind the bulk of the earth.

I shut my eyes, shaking my head slightly to clear it. At least accidentally staring at the sky for a long time because I forgot I could move my eyes was less weird than accidentally staring at a wall—or worse, another person.

"Whoa," Jake said suddenly.

I opened my eyes. He holding out both hands like he was about to fall over even though he was still sitting down.

I sat up and quickly took the bottle away from him again, holding it up to the light to peer through the glass. "How much did you drink?" I asked.

Jake tried to grab the bottle back from me and missed by several inches. "Not that much," he said indignantly.

"If you pass out up here that's going to be your problem, because I am _not_ moving your sorry ass," I told him, setting the bottle out of his reach.

He glared at me, slightly cross-eyed, and I winced. I probably should have been paying closer attention—as far as I knew he'd never had alcohol in his life before, so of course his tolerance was shit.

"You can have more once you've convinced me you're not going to do anything stupid," I said, unable to believe how mom-ish I sounded even to myself.

"Your face is stupid," he said, affirming my decision to cut him off for the time being.

"Yeah, yeah," I said patiently, taking a sip of my own.

The night was cold and clear around us, shivering lightly against my skin in contrast to the alcohol-flush from within.

Jake stood up suddenly, leaning way over the edge of the roof to look down at the street below. "Head rush," he breathed.

"Don't fall," I said automatically.

He turned away from the view to raise an eyebrow at me, expression condescending.

I refused to back down. "Are you _certain_ that if you morph you won't just turn into a drunk bird? And then crash into something?"

"Ninety-five percent sure." Defiantly, he boosted himself up to sit with his legs hanging off the side of the retaining wall.

We were almost five hundred feet off the ground, the wind beating gently against our skin. I couldn't help it; I walked over to lean next to Jake on the wall. Not that I'd be all that much help if he did fall off.

Jake snorted as if he knew what I was thinking, and scooted a couple inches closer to the edge. "I'm not gonna die," he said. "Not from falling off some measly little building."

"What was it like?" I asked before I could stop myself.

Jake glanced over at me. "Hmm?"

I hesitated, but I couldn't come up with a way to change the question. "Being dead."

"Oh. That."

We were both silent for a while, Jake kicking his legs against the concrete as he thought.

"You remember that big old tree that used to be behind the house?" Jake said at last. He was still looking down at the street below in apparent fascination. "And how there was that one spot where, if you inched waaaay out on the branch, it'd start tilting more and more under your weight..."

"And we'd dare each other to see who could get closer to the very end?"

He tilted his head around to smile cheekily at me. "I always won."

I snorted. "Yeah, but only because you were smaller." And braver. And stupider. And more willing to risk anything for an approving smile from me.

"You remember that one time it actually snapped?"

"You were lucky you didn't break your neck," I said.

He twisted around to huff a sigh at me, leaning even more of his weight off the side in the process. "It wasn't _that_ far off the ground. I barely got the wind knocked out of me."

Yeah, and I'd almost broken my own neck jumping down after him. For the first several seconds when he'd been pale and wheezing on the ground I'd seriously started considering what I would tell my parents if I'd actually killed him.

"Anyway, before I fell, but after it broke? That crack when it finally, _finally_ gave way? That millisecond of weightlessness? Everything just stopped. All that tension, all that waiting and holding my breath and trying not to be afraid, and in half a second—" He snapped his fingers. "Bam. Gone."

"Terrifying, then."

"You kidding me?" he said. "It was _awesome_. That feeling of relief, the tension being finally gone, the worst we'd been waiting for actually really _happening_? Fucking incredible. The future was here. It was like the feeling of picking at a scab, and then that awesome moment when it _finally_ pulls off is even better, even louder, than the pain and the blood. It was like flying, but even more exhilarating."

I moistened my lips. "That was what dying felt like?"

"Yeah. I mean, I didn't know what was happening at the time. And maybe if I had..." He swallowed, taking a deep breath. "If I'd had time to think about it before—Before. Then it'd be... different. And after, I got to wake up. Got to go back to how things were, as if it had never happened."

"There was no hitting the ground," I said. "No bloody sore where the scab came off."

"That was what it was like actually dying." He was hunched forward, as if daring himself to tip all the way over that edge. He whispered something else.

"What?"

Jake laughed in a way that let me know he was a breath away from crying. "I don't remember being dead," he whispered again. "No bright light, no heaven, no hell, no purgatory or limbo or any of those others. Just _nothing_. And that." He had to take another deep breath before he could speak. "That scares the _hell_ out of me."

I swallowed, leaning against the wall. It didn't necessarily mean anything. He hadn't ever really been dead—he was here now. Didn't mean he had actually seen, actually _knew_...

"And if that's all there is." Jake's voice was strained, flat. "Then it's the worst possible... There is nothing worse. Than what I did to her, to those yeerks, what I tried to do to y—"

I grabbed him so hard I probably hurt him, dragging him off the wall and back to the safety of the roof.

"Don't you think like that!" My voice was hoarse, shaking. I couldn't tell if I was more angry or afraid. "There are things a hell of a lot worse than nothing. There's shit that can make you pray that you're going to die in your sleep tonight and that when you do you get snuffed out."

He leaned into me. "And I tried to make it happen."

"That's not... You... you _stupid_..."

Jake pulled his arm back sharply, watching me through hard eyes. "Don't pretend it never happened. What I did—"

"For love of—There are times when I think you actually _believe_ what everyone at CNN says about you," I snapped.

"That I'm destined to be the next president of the United States?"

"That you're some all-knowing all-powerful messiah! You're _not_ , dumbass!"

"Gee, thanks, Tom. That makes me feel all better."

"Don't—" I took a deep breath. "Don't you go thinking that you're responsible for everything that happened during the war, because you're not. That every bad thing in the world could have been prevented by little old you. You're one person. And you're not a superhero. You're a kid who got thrown into an impossible situation, and then rose to the occasion. You were scared, and naive, and you did pretty damn well anyway."

"Still woulda gotten you killed, if it had been up to me."

"Yeah, well—" I spread my arms out. "Not dead now, am I?"

Jake looked away. "That doesn't change anything."

"Oh, that's very nice for you," I said, disgusted. "But it sure as hell makes a difference to me, thank you very much. Anyway, the point is, you did the best you could. And it was a war, and it still had casualties, and at the end of the day there were less because you were there than there would have been if you'd found out about the yeerks and decided to let it be somebody else's problem."

Jake sat down on the roof, pulling his legs up to his chest. "You don't know that for sure."

The bottle was still resting on the low fire wall, so I scooped it up and screwed the top on, rolling it over to him.

"I know that if you six _hadn't_ done something we'd all be controllers right now," I said flatly. "I _know_ that. You gave it everything you had. And even if you weren't always perfect, you still did a hell of a lot more than most people would have in your situation. You're _not_ perfect, nowhere close, but you did okay despite that."

Jake looked like he wanted to argue but couldn't come up with a good answer. Instead he grabbed the bottle, unscrewed the cap with unnecessary force, and tossed an angry sip into his mouth.

We passed the bottle back and forth in silence for a while longer. And then—

"Y'ever miss it?" Jake said.

I lifted my head. It took a little effort to focus on him. "Miss what?"

He made a vague gesture in the air. "The war."

"Fuck you, I never fought in any damn war," I slurred.

Jake nodded like this was a deep and wise revelation on my part. "Yeah."

"This the part where you say, 'Well I do'?" I asked, already regretting the question.

Jake squinted at me. "Well I do what?"

I sighed, glancing again at the more-than-half-empty bottle in my hand. "I should have cut you off like eight ounces ago."

"But what do I do?" Jake was apparently not following the conversation.

I set the bottle on the concrete of the rooftop with more force than was strictly necessary. "Do you miss the war?" I enunciated.

"What makes you think that?" he said defensively.

"Okay, you are officially too stupid right now to be talking about this kind of shit." I pointed a finger at him. And then I stopped, considered, and realized that that sentence had been about 30% incomprehensible mumble. Maybe I was a little stupid too.

I took another drink to avoid thinking about it.

"It's not like that, okay?" Jake burst out suddenly. "I don't like when it's all killing and dying and I didn't like it then. It's just, I mean, it was kind of easier sometimes, okay? I hated it, and I don't miss it, but..." He trailed off, looking down at the concrete.

"Go ahead," I said, waving a hand in the air.

He glanced back up, expression still uncertain. "I just mean... It was _simpler_. No, that's... It was all really complicated, and all the decisions were bad ones, but... It's like, everything was just the fight, and that was it. Pure survival mode, y'know? And there wasn't time for anything else. You could just set _everything_ aside, because there was only one priority, and it was keeping everyone alive. You knew where you stood, and everything else came second. Or... or never. There was one problem. Just one."

I was silent. I didn't get it, not really, but I could see a little bit of what he was talking about. Even infestation had made everything _simpler_ , as he said. All my problems concentrated into one place at one time, small enough to fit inside my skull.

"Anyway, then stuff ended, and I guess we kind of won." Jake closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the wall. "It's over. And now that it is..." He made a gesture, spreading out the fingers of both hands and holding them about a foot apart before bringing the tips of all his fingers together, as if miming an implosion. "It all came rushing in. No more survival mode. No more setting it all aside to get through today. No more excuses about putting a brave face on it. Just... Shit. Piles and piles of shit. From school, from life, from inside my own friggin brain, and..."

He paused for so long I was starting to think he was never going to finish the sentence.

"And?" I prompted.

"And that's it," he said at last. "There aren't problems to solve, it's not a matter of saving as many as you can and knowing that if nothing else at least you're trying to make a difference. It's just... Waking up in the morning. Trying to function.

"And it's not like you know when you're done. And when you try to ask people about it, you get some kind of friggin' existential _debate_ , not Rachel and Marco bickering about the best way to blow up a McDonald's. But, like, everybody still knows it's going to get blown one way or another, and we can solve everything else except that one McDonald's someday later. Only now it's later, and I kind of thought that _after the war_ was going to be like _before the war_ , not like I can't ever get away from the _during_. Y'know?"

"Not really," I said honestly. "Sorry."

"Shut up."

"Sorry, man, but I think I'm the wrong person for this. You ever try talking to—?"

He let his head thunk sharply against the low wall behind him, still with his eyes closed. "Why the hell does everyone always bring Cassie up all the time?"

"Why the hell do you always assume that everyone's going to bring Cassie up all the time?" I shot back.

Jake opened his eyes to glare at me. "I do not!"

I didn't bother to dignify that one with a response. "I was going to suggest Marco," I said dryly. "But then, I guess you don't have a picture of _Marco_ strangling a raccoon on your desk at home, so what was I thinking."

"It's a badger, not a raccoon," Jake said primly. "And she's not _strangling_ it, you moron, she's giving it antibiotics."

"Oh." Once I thought about it that made more sense; strangling a wild animal did seem like an unCassieish thing to do.

"Anyway, she's..." Jake sighed. "She's _good_. And that means always looking for the right answer. Working at it. Even when it's really damn uncomfortable. Even when Marco laughs at her for it. Even when it means not winning the battle, because the war is what matters. She's not... She wanted out of the war, and so she's out. I already dragged her in once, fuck if I'm going to do it again." He was speaking so quietly by the end that I wondered if he was on the verge of falling asleep. His eyes were drooping closed again.

"Shoulda known drunk Jake would be philosophical Jake," I muttered.

"You're kind of an asshole sometimes, you know that?"

"Sorry." I shrugged. "I used to have a brain-to-mouth filter, but I misplaced it somewhere. Haven't seen it in months. It was about yay big—" I held up my fingers about six inches apart, even though Jake wasn't looking. "Grey, squishy, mostly harmless-looking?"

Jake snorted. "'Harmless-looking?'"

I waved my hand dismissively. "'s just the Stockholm Syndrome talking."

Jake's eyes flew open and he sat bolt upright. "You _do not_ have Stockholm Syndrome," he said sharply.

I wasn't sure why that had pissed him off, but I just laughed uncomfortably, looking away. "Sure I do. When thoughtcrime's an actual _crime_ , sooner or later everybody and their aunt starts thinking like the yeerks do."

"Thoughtcrime?"

"Did you ever actually read _any_ of the books assigned in English class?" I asked.

He drew himself up. "For your information, _Mom_ , I finished almost half of _All Quiet on the Western Front_ before I wrote my paper on it. And I got a B-plus."

I rolled my eyes, which just ended up making me feel dizzy. "Of course you did." Jake _would_ go for the one with the gore and the amputations and the deep existential questions about the true meaning of justifiable war. "Anyway," I said, "Thoughtcrime's when you think something like 'yeerks suck' and then next thing you know you get to spend the next six hours feeling like your head's about to explode. So you stop doing it. Stop even thinking the things you're not allowed to think."

"Fine," Jake said tightly. "But that's not Stockholm Syndrome. That's just doing what you have to in order to survive."

"Oh, you have no idea the things I'd do to survive," I said bitterly. I turned away, staring up at the sky.

Jake's laugh was weary and unamused. "I think I might know more than you think I do."

" _Bullshit_." I was caught off-guard by the suddenness of my own anger.

"Still—"

"No." I pushed myself to my feet. "No. Don't you _start_. You don't know anything!"

"I know you did nothing wrong," Jake said quietly.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

Jake jerked back, eyes wide and hurt. I refused to feel guilty.

"You want know what I _miss_ from the _war_?" My voice was too loud, too hoarse. "Do you, hero?"

"Tom..."

"I miss _knowing_ my _place_. I miss knowing that if nothing else—because, trust me, I was _nothing else_ —at least I was a good little slave." I laughed, and the motion hurt. My whole body hurt. "That I could do as I was told. Could keep my head down and my trap shut. And in exchange they wouldn't punish you. Would let you have an extra ten minutes in the cages during feeding. And that was _kind_. That was _good_. That was more than a piece of _filth_ like me deserved!"

Jake was watching me, white-faced. I wanted to shake him. Punch him. Hurt him until he understood. Until he stopped being so goddamn naive.

"They. Broke. Me." I made sure to sound out every consonant so there was no chance I would be misunderstood. "They made me cry for them. They made me crawl. And I did it. Like a dog that's been beaten so many times all it can do is beg for more. Only it was all happening in _here_." I cupped a hand around the side of my head, snatching my fingers together into a fist. I could feel my whole body shaking.

"Tom—"

"And _it's all still in there_ ," I snarled. "I'm still that groveling, broken _thing_ they made out of me. Only now that I don't have anyone pulling my strings anymore I don't know what to do with myself. And I actually _miss_ it. Miss being told what to do. Miss being _good_. Because they broke me that well."

Jake's eyes were shining and wet. Great. I'd finally shocked him. Horrified him. Perfect. Exactly what I wanted. Sure.

"So, yeah." I wrapped my arms around myself. I was breathing so hard my whole upper body was rocking slightly with each inhale and exhale. "I call that Stockholm Syndrome. I call it giving up. Because it's that, or admit they were right all along about me."

I swallowed hard, fighting tears. Losing. I wouldn't throw up. I wouldn't throw up. I might throw up.

It took him four deep breaths—I watched, counting—but Jake's voice came out steady. "Okay. Stockholm Syndrome, then," he said. Like he was conceding a point to a rival debate team. "Tell me."

I blinked. "What?"

"You said I don't get it, and..." Another deep breath. "You're right. I don't. So explain to me."

He still sounded like we were having a sane, normal conversation. Like he was genuinely curious, even though his expression was sickened.

I waited another minute for him to... I don't know. React, I guess. But he was still just watching me like he had nothing better to do with himself than sit around and listen to my word vomit.

"Y'know the only thing that makes an involuntary an involuntary is the fact that it hasn't learned yet what the voluntaries already know." My eyes dropped away from him, focusing on the concrete instead. I made it happen, but it didn't feel that way. "The voluntaries _know_ that that the body is the yeerk's. That all these quaint notions about eyes and tongues and fingernails somehow _belonging_ to that obnoxious little voice that grows inside the brain are all crap. That that little voice is just... residual. Vestigial. An accident of biology, and one that can be corrected with the right kind of guidance."

I was slurring more, losing the thread of what I was saying. I found I couldn't look at Jake. "That when you do it right, the voice just dies off. The defective hosts are the ones who are too stupid to understand it. Who have all these old-fashioned ideas about _self_ and _autonomy_ , when their entire reality contradicts those silly notions."

Jake didn't say anything, waiting for me to go on.

I took a deep breath. "And I believed them. It felt like they were right. It's... there's no _you_ anymore, after a while. You scream just to hear your own voice, but it's not like anyone else can even tell. So why bother? You're just a voice, inside of space. And if you're good and quiet you get to be seen and not heard, and it doesn't hurt as much. The mind—fuck, the _yeerk_ —takes care of that body you can still feel, if you're good. It lets the body be warm and soft and rested. So you learn to be quiet. You learn to stop fighting, to be not even a voice anymore. Just... nothing. So that they will be kind. Do what they have to with your body, and only punish you when they need to. Just as long as you learn to do as you're told. You obey, and eventually you believe."

Jake chewed on his lip for a moment, thinking it over, and then he shook his head. "Nope, sorry, that still just sounds like doing what you have to in order to survive."

"Don't you dare be flippant with me," I said flatly.

"I didn't mean it like that."

I forced myself to make eye contact with him. His expression was cold, serious. No trace of that earlier dark amusement.

Jake stood up. The cautious way he walked toward me suggested he had some inkling of how close I'd come to punching him earlier. "Maybe I'm just seeing it from the outside," he said, "so I really don't know what I'm talking about. But it seems like you only had one choice, and it was a pretty crappy one at that. Seems to me like you chose to live, to keep going, instead of fading away. Seems like you already know that the BS the yeerks were spitting out was wrong, or else you'd still think you were right to believe them at the time."

"I..." I shut my mouth, not saying anything else. He didn't understand—how could he?—but if that was what he actually thought, it was something to think about. "I don't know," I whispered.

"You think I do?" Jake leaned against the low wall. "I'm just telling you what I think, and we both know I'm the one who's a mess, so—"

"You do okay," I said.

"Yeah, so do you."

Suddenly exhausted, I stumbled back a step to sit on the parapet. I still wasn't convinced Jake was right, but the fact that it was possible to hear what I'd just said and arrive at that conclusion... Okay, he was biased. And maybe that was all.

And maybe he had just a little bit of a point, too.

"Don't fall," Jake said.

I laughed tiredly. "Shut up."

"Are you... okay?" His voice was small.

"Well, apparently now I'm a role model for six-year-olds the world over, but I think I'll survive somehow," I said.

Jake looked like he was going to demand a real answer from me, but after a second he just took a deep breath and nodded, tension going out of his shoulders. He bent down, scooping up the bottle where we'd abandoned it. It had been lying on its side with the top mostly off, and he spilled more of it as he uprighted it.

"Isn't that bad luck or something, spilling alcohol?" I said.

He tilted the bottle, judging how much was left, and then took another long drink. "I think that's only for salt. This's just wasteful."

"If you say so."

"See?" He tilted his head back and finished what was left in two long gulps. "Waste not." He tilted his head back down and his entire body went with it, stumbling forward two steps. "Whoops."

"Don't puke," I said.

He glared at me. "I'm not going to."

There was a sudden screech of rusted metal behind us. Jake turned to move toward the sound a lot faster than I did, almost falling over.

The door from the roof to the rest of the building had swung open. The mustached guy standing on the other side was wearing a security guard's uniform and a pissed-off expression.

"Shit," I muttered, standing up to take a few steps toward the guy.

Jake patted me clumsily on the arm. "Don't worry, he's probably not a controller," he whispered.

I pressed a hand over my eyes in exasperation. "Thanks, midget."

"Hey! You kids can't be up here!" The guard shone the beam of his long-handled flashlight directly in our eyes in the most transparent intimidation technique I'd ever seen.

"Yeah, uh, sorry about that," I called back. I took a step toward the edge of the roof, and then another. "We didn't damage anything, I promise."

"I'll be the one to make that call," the guard snapped. "You two are still in for a world of trouble."

Jake giggled. I elbowed him, shooting him a glare.

The guard took another step closer to us. "You think that's funny, you delinquent punk?"

"See?" Jake whispered loudly. " _He_ thinks I'm a delinquent."

"I don't know how you got up here, but you are going to get down right now—"

"Okay." Jake turned around, smirking at me with lips that were already starting to harden into a beak.

And then he did a fucking swan dive off the side of the EGS Tower.

I sighed. So much for resolving this subtly.

The guard yelled in horror, running forward several steps as if there was actually still time to stop him.

"He's fine," I said quickly. "He does this all the time." I was backing away as I spoke, already focusing on the morph. I almost tripped when I shrank several inches, but kept moving. "We're just gonna go now, okay?" I boosted myself up onto the parapet, feeling my bones stretch and become hollow. "Sorry about the trespa—"

My left leg finished morphing before my right one did and I tumbled off the roof. I twisted around in midair, frantically focusing on dark feathers and eagle eyes and hollow bones. My wings caught me ten feet off the ground—still far too close for my liking—and I swooped low over the roofs of cars as the last of the internal changes ground into place.

The night air snapped against my feathers, sound and sight assaulting me. I was suddenly, instantly sober, aware of the looming concrete buildings all around and the cold pavement below. There was a flash of white-and-black feathers up ahead, and I flapped once, cutting through the air to catch up.

Jake was flapping hard, spiraling upward in the cold inert air of dusk. I easily shot past him, taking advantage of my much larger wingspan. I circled there for a second, waiting for him to catch up as the city lights flickered to life almost a mile below us. I couldn't actually see our house from here—maybe if it had been full daylight; these eyes were insane—but that was all right. I knew which direction to go.

{Last one there's a rotten egg!} Jake called as he shot past me, translating the height into a long dive.

{Oh, you little cheater, you are going _down_ ,} I said.

{You'll have to catch me first.}

Laughing silently, I tilted my wings toward home.


End file.
